Short Cuts: Episode VI 
The Great White Hope
Democrats haven’t won a statewide race since 1994, so why does this middle-aged guy with a bald head and big ears think he's the fresh face of the party? Because outgoing Houston mayor Bill White has a record that makes some Republicans envious, he can raise a ton of money, and he will kiss as many babies as it takes (whether they want him to or not).
Doug says: Without a doubt, Texas needs Bill White! Think of it, going from "big hair" to "big brain!" (November 27th, 2009 at 9:39pm)
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The reason White shifted his attention away from the company was that his burgeoning career had taken yet another turn: In 1997 he had been named the president and CEO of the Wedge Group, a Houston-based holding company for energy, manufacturing, real estate, hotel, and other interests, with approximately $200 million in revenues, owned by then—Lebanese deputy prime minister Issam Fares. Its business was acquiring firms, running them and fixing them up, then selling them at a profit. White proved an able executive; in the years after he took over, the company saw an 80 percent annualized return on its assets. White made millions. He held board meetings in Monaco. He spent time in Spain learning Spanish, which was not an idle hobby. White, who calculates many moves ahead and many years into the future, was thinking about politics again. In 2003 he spent $2.2 million of his own money, leaned on his business friends to raise a record $8.6 million, and came out of nowhere to win the mayor’s race against veteran Houston politicians Sylvester Turner and Orlando Sanchez.
Though he is a lifelong Democrat, White is not an ideologue. He is a resolute pragmatist, a problem solver, a man who sees the world as a succession of challenges, great and small, that can be resolved by the application of old-fashioned horse sense, fair play, and raw intelligence. It is a strikingly simple, binary vision. That is not to say that White is inflexible; he is famous for compromise, because he believes that consensus is the intelligent way to govern. He is disappointed when his city council votes are not unanimous, because he works hard at accommodating the members, and such a vote amounts to a challenge to his sense of the rightness of things, to his conviction that smart and sensible people will automatically see and appreciate good ideas. “I want the city council to realize that they are my partners in governing the city,” he says. “The people in Houston want a safer city, they want jobs, they want it to be easier to get around, they want amenities like parks and libraries, and they don’t want to pay more than they have to in property taxes. These are goals we share in common. If somebody has a better way of approaching that goal, we ought to listen. But if somebody is doing something for a reason that is not factual or based on a mistake, then we ought to correct the mistake.”
This is the way White talks. Behind his pragmatism stands a stern view of morality that is never far from the surface. Once one of his acquaintances, who had raised a good deal of money for the police department, sent White a speeding ticket he had received, assuming White would fix it. White sent it back with a note asking if the man would like his contributions refunded. Likewise, he bridles at the notion that politics could possibly influence the awarding of city contracts. Early in his administration, when he heard that a Wall Street firm that did business with the city had retained a prominent political fund-raiser, he publicly criticized the company, lecturing it on civic morality and making it clear, as he says, that such a firm “was not on the program of my administration . . .
What I don’t like is the influence of money on politics.”
One of White’s early triumphs—and a classic example of how he operates—was his untangling of the city’s finances. White is good with numbers. He finds reading spreadsheets late at night relaxing. Two years before he was even elected mayor, he had volunteered to help the city, which was running short of money to pay for parks and libraries. Within a few months he had restructured the repayment of city bonds in such a way that he freed $80 million for parks and $40 million for libraries, with no tax increase. City officials, who were getting what seemed to be free money, were amazed. “I don’t think I am a stranger to public finance,” Houston’s chief administrative officer Al Haines told the Chronicle at the time, “but this was like going back to school. Bill really immersed himself in this.”
His skills became apparent in the early months of his administration in 2004, when White discovered what amounted to a time bomb embedded in the municipal pension system. The city, as it turned out, had accidentally been too generous. The pension board had originally estimated that funding the pension plan would consume about 15 percent of the total payroll for this group. White figured out that the pension fund was going to eat an astonishing 52 percent of the payroll. His subsequent retooling of the pension system—which included passing a citywide referendum—was one of his first successes as mayor.
“I have not seen a mayor get involved in that much financial detail,” says Judy Gray Johnson, a former Houston city comptroller and former city director of finance and administration. “He wanted to know every decision that was made that affected finances not just for the immediate impact but for what would happen over a five-year period. I learned very quickly that I could never give him a number that wasn’t solid and I could never fudge because he would remember everything.” In lockstep with the mayor was his fourteen-member council, which gave him comfortable majorities on most of the city’s key issues. “His style of leadership is one of collaboration and thoughtfulness and attention to detail,” says council member Clutterbuck, a Republican who, like several other Republicans on the council, chairs an important committee (in her case, Budget and Fiscal Affairs). “He is frankly one of the reasons I chose to run for office. I wanted to be part of working with that leadership style.”
Through it all he was his calm, persistent self in public, while making often brutal demands on his staff. White is in fact obsessive about work, sleeping just a few hours a night and spending very little time doing anything else. His wife and three children are all volunteering for his Senate campaign. “He is hard on himself and very demanding of others,” says Bob Stein, a professor of political science at Rice who has worked with White on various issues on a pro bono basis. “If you fail Bill, you are pretty much out of favor.”
It is this résumé that drives White’s campaign for the Senate. He has so much to talk about, so many victories to boast of, so few enemies and critics, that he can sometimes seem a bit unreal. Too machinelike, perhaps. And it is true that you have to go looking hard to find much that is truly negative about his six-year tenure as mayor. His success, from Katrina forward and including an equally impressive performance in helping the city recover from Hurricane Ike in 2008, has mostly silenced his opposition. In the race to replace him as mayor this year, no candidate uttered a bad word about Bill White.
There is no such immunity in the Senate race, where the opposition’s big guns are already trained on him. After governing a city in a bipartisan way, he is suddenly vulnerable simply because he is a Democrat in a red state where Obama’s fragile popularity is already waning. In September he came under pointed attack by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, which claimed he supported Obama’s cap and trade system to limit carbon dioxide emissions, saying it would lead to “higher energy costs, increased taxes, and a loss in jobs.” He is pilloried in the blogosphere for his advocacy of Houston as a “sanctuary city,” meaning a place where the police do not question people about their immigrant status.
His opponents are also starting to focus on his three terms as mayor. He has not made many political mistakes, but with a record as clean as White’s, they tend to stand out. In September 2004, White appeared at a fundraiser for then—House majority leader Tom DeLay, of Sugar Land. Though this was before DeLay was officially admonished by the House Ethics Committee, it was after a Houston area congressman, Democrat Chris Bell, had filed an ethics complaint against him. White had also appointed DeLay’s former top aide Ann Travis as his chief of governmental affairs.
“I think Bill believed he had to work with DeLay to get urban rail,” says Bell, who now works as a lawyer in Houston. “But a lot of us felt it went too far. I had just filed the ethics complaint against DeLay when I learned that the mayor was going to be a special guest at a fundraiser for him. Later Bill appeared in a video tribute for DeLay. It didn’t sit well.”
Then there are some minor political sins that will no doubt also resurface in the coming months. In January White wrote a letter on behalf of developer Marvy Finger asking Houstonians to consider renting in his new One Park Place tower, a building rising above Discovery Green, one of White’s proudest accomplishments. White was promoting his pet project and the crown jewel of his program to increase urban parkland, but “exhorting Houstonians,” as the Chronicle put it, to rent from a private commercial developer was out of keeping with the White administration’s strict intolerance of cronyism and insider deals. Another apparent lapse in judgment was a political ad that ran the same month in the Houston Defender, a newspaper serving the black community. It featured pictures of White, Martin Luther King Jr., and Obama, with the words “The Hope [White], The Dream [King] and The Change [Obama].” The ad, which seemed to many to equate White with King, caused a minor uproar among some community activists. Though it was produced by the Defender’s staff, it was paid for by the White campaign. He angered conservatives and property rights advocates—and even his friend Bob Lanier—when he loudly vowed to stop a high-rise apartment building that was going up near leafy, residential West University Place. Since then, White has engineered what the group that opposed him most strongly, Houstonians for Responsible Growth, now calls “a reasonable balance between neighborhood concerns and the market-driven growth that has made possible our affordable home prices.” Still, opponents on the right may well use this against him too.
White, meanwhile, is moving ahead, traveling the state on weekends in his rented jet, touting his record as mayor. With his virtually built-in capacity to carry Harris County, the state’s most populous; his ability to raise enormous sums of money from both Democrats and Republicans; and his deep Rolodex of friends and party regulars from his days as chair of the Texas Democratic Party, he is already clearly among the front-runners for Hutchison’s Senate seat. He will need that cash to sell himself to the rest of the state, which doesn’t know him yet and may find him, as Houstonians once did, somewhat less than spectacular.
Shortly before he was elected to his first term, White was riding with his friend, the renewable-energy executive Michael Zilkha, when he fell off his bicycle and broke his collarbone. “I drove him to Methodist Hospital,” says Zilkha, “and when he went into the emergency room, no one recognized him, even though he was on the board of the hospital. That would never happen today.”
Indeed it would not. White’s transformation from a complete unknown to a household name in Houston in the space of six short years is a reminder of how fast things can change in Texas politics. He can only hope that the rest of the state catches on as quickly, instead of dismissing him as the latest long-shot Democrat who is convinced he can break through the Republican tide.
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